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I've been on a quest to find a copy of Wagon's West for the BBC Micro for over twenty years. You see, I played it with three classmates when we are all nine years old on a BBC Model B in the corner of a draughty prefab. Back then the BBC was a mysterious behemoth of a machine. Our teachers used to wheel them in on white trolleys, machines complete with a 5.25" disc drive and CUB monitor, and declare to us that we were going to be involved in a new project. Wagons West was one of these projects. The game was intended as the centrepiece in a whole mini-universe of creative writing, historical appreciation, geography and journaling. And, as we will see, at least in the sense that I vividly remember it, it really worked.

In terms of educational software, it was clearly a triple A release. It came with hundreds of 'Information sheets' for us children to read and complete. And, under the watchful eye of teacher Mrs. Murray, each of us was expected to take it seriously. She wasn't one of those teachers who you messed with. And, luckily for me, Wagons West was indeed quite an enjoyable project, although even at that young age I recall I was aware of its limitations.

Finally (over four decades later) a copy of this educational game has been found and archived by the good folk over at FlaxCottage. Just the main game, natch, not any of the bumph that originally came supplied with it. But, hey, many games on the Internet haven't had their full instructions archived yet so that's not too big of a problem, right? The most important thing is that, if I want to, I (and of course you, if you're so minded) can now relive the perilous 3,600km journey from Indiana to California in a train of covered wagons. Incredible. And that's the most important thing, right?

Well, yes, I suppose so. However, without the instructions, there are a few problems that could well mean most people won't get much further than a few screens in. You see, Wagons West was, as I've outlined, designed to be used with a class of children aged 7-11, and some of the prompts made by the game require you, playing as one of such children, to regurgitate the information your teacher previously gave you. Except, naturally enough, Mrs. Murray hasn't supplied you with the photocopied information sheets that you need if you just go and download the disc from the Internet.

So, for example, when you arrive at the marketplace to buy your covered wagons, a merchant will ask your family where they hail from. The program will be waiting for you to type in one of ten short towns from which settlers emigrated in 1852. However unless you are some sort of history buff, you are unlikely to know the answer. In the classroom setting, there were cards given to each group of four children, cards which told them their name, and town of residence. It was a simple matter of copying the information from the card to the BBC. But now this prompt practically cripples the game.

Fortunately, a bit of Googling, or a quick read of the Acorn User review of the package, will give you an acceptable answer (Marion) and allow you to start haggling with the tradesman. Well, I say haggling, it's a sort of rudimentary for...next loop which I found laughable even in my youth. Basically, the tradesman offers you covered wagons for $24 each and you type in what you'd "like" to pay and he responds "I might as well give them away for that!" And even if you type $23 four times and $15 on the fifth, he'll always accept proclaiming "You sure do drive a hard bargain!" It's funny. But for the wrong reasons.

Anyway, after your wagon train is all stocked up, it's time to begin the game proper. I recall as a child that this was as arduous a task as the settlers' journey itself (Well alright not really!) with Mrs. Murray demanding that we document each stage of our journey in a handwritten diary, along with the decisions that we took, and the consequences those decisions had.

Essentially, the great majority of Wagons West is a Choose Your Own Adventure game. The journey spans two double-sided 80 track discs and, with all of the journaling and cross-referencing that children were expected to do as they played it, I recall that it ate up about five hours of our group's time. You'll know when you're halfway through your journey because you'll be instructed to swap discs - an operation that I remember I did as a child whilst one Kirsty Rutherford complained that "only a teacher should do that".

The idea is that the game "immerses" the player in the role of an emigrating settler. The journey to California is a very long one and you and your family supposedly only have a finite amount of money to get there. After you have bought your covered wagons you'll be prompted to stock up on provisions. Again, without the accompanying maps and charts, it's difficult to do anything but make wild guesses as to how much of anything you should take... However I actually think that, even if you did have the maps you might struggle. I mean, how many kilograms of sugar should we take on an unknown route fraught with danger and where granny might pop her clogs two days in? It doesn't fit nicely into a formula.

Assuming that you do eventually enter some weights and measures that the game accepts, then the adventure begins. And... well, it's certainly an interesting educational game. Graphically, it's superb with every pass, valley and mountain range illustrated in full Mode 1 colours. Aurally it's basically silent except for when it plays you an energetic four channel Oh Susanna. And as for playability, well, that's why I say interesting because it's one of those branching storyline games but one that's not really done all that well.

It gets a lot of things right. The problems come immediately, from wagons getting stuck in the mud, to how to deal with infighting within the train, to people being infected with cholera and/or being bitten by snakes. You get a choice of how to deal with each situation in the form of three decisions, and the game cleverly adjusts at random whether or not the answer given was a good or a bad decision. For example, a guide can be picked up en route and he will suggest a shortcut. You can decide to follow his suggestion or ignore it. If you follow it, in some games you will save time and get to your next checkpoint a bit faster. But in other games, he'll wind up leading your train in the wrong direction and wasting a lot of time instead. So there's no 'learning the right answers' here, which is good in a classroom environment, because you can imagine children watching other children play the game and not making the 'bad' decisions they did, only to be met with even more severe consequences.

However, the randomness of every journey quickly becomes very demotivating. Firstly, there are obvious oversights. You can choose to buy a single covered wagon and be told "six wagons get stuck in the mud". I know it probably means six wagons in the train (i.e. not necessarily wagons belonging to you) but children won't understand that, and will just think it's shoddy programming.

Secondly, the fact that the outcome of each decision changes with every play makes any strategising completely redundant. This even extends to some of the very decisions that the game asks you to make. For example, when you uncover a thief you are given the option, amongst others, to hang him. But when I elected to do so, I was told that was too harsh a punishment and that the thief had been banished to the desert instead.

Before long you just feel that your decisions do not really matter. Instead of trying to discover the optimum route, you just read the three options and choose one of them as quickly as possible. After all, if the consequences are simply at the computer's whim, there's precious little point in thinking about what to do at all.

Something else that grates when playing the game as an adult is that it has clearly been designed to be played in bite-sized chunks, probably in an attempt to cater for the short attention span of the average ten year old. To get around the obvious problem of ten groups of children needing 'save game' files, every time you complete a section, your wagon count, provisions and people count are shown on-screen for you to record in your journal. Sort of like a manual save game routine, you're told to copy this down and re-input it when you come back for the next section. This gets really tiresome when you just want to make progress.

And, speaking of progress, as far as I know, no matter how ridiculous your decisions, you cannot actually lose. The wagon trail will always make it to California even if you're sadistically trying to wipe it out en route by choosing the most dangerous of the options the game presents. Oh alright, I know it's for children and we wouldn't want to discourage the little darlings, but I'm pretty sure whole families in 1852 didn't make it, so I don't see why stupidity shouldn't be acknowledged with quick death a la Granny's Garden.

Now, having said all that, Wagons West is undoubtedly quite a powerful educational tool. I mean, I still recall this period of American history some 40 years later simply because I played this game. Now that may well be more because I was fascinated by the technology that powered it than the era it chronicled but, still, it taught me something. Which is no small feat. Playing it through now I even felt more of an affinity for all those families in the train and you can even see it as an allegory of sorts for asylum seekers who make their way from war-torn countries to relative luxury in the West. I'd venture to suggest they would encounter many of the same problems.

If you happen to be American, I would even suggest that, this being a piece of your history, you may well enjoy it more than I did. Primarily, because you will actually recognise all the locations the wagon train visits on its perilous journey.

To conclude then, I am beyond ecstatic to get to play Wagons West again after all these years. It's been requested various times on forums over the past 40 years and it's clear that a lot of children used this game when they were at school, and I have even detected quite a bit of heartbreak when people have suggested it may remain lost forever.

Yes, it might be aimed at young children, but there is much that adults can glean from it too. Certainly it remains at the very apex of educational software; comparing it to anything is difficult as a result. The vast majority of educational games are small, single-load Mode 7 ceefax-looking affairs aimed at much younger children. Wagons West is much more ambitious and certainly, if you are looking for a project for some parent-child collaboration this weekend, you could do a lot worse than download it.